Saturday, July 18, 2015

On a sunny afternoon, at a bustling cafe less than a mile from
Stanford University’s Palo Alto campus and more than 5,000 miles from
his home, an assistant professor from MIT is telling me about science.
Very advanced science. His name is Jeremy England, and at 33, he’s
already being called the next Charles Darwin.

Say what?

In
town to give a lecture, the Harvard grad and Rhodes scholar speaks
quickly, his voice rising a few pitches in tone, his long-fingered hands
making sudden jerks when he’s excited. He’s skinny, with a long face,
scraggly beard and carelessly groomed mop of sandy brown hair — what you
might expect from a theoretical physicist. But then there’s the
street-style Adidas on his feet and the kippah atop his head. And the
fact that this scientist also talks a lot about God.

Every 30 years or so we experience these gigantic steps forward. …And this might be it.

Carl Franck, a Cornell physics professor

The
101 version of his big idea is this: Under the right conditions, a
random group of atoms will self-organize, unbidden, to more effectively
use energy. Over time and with just the right amount of, say, sunlight, a
cluster of atoms could come remarkably close to what we call life. In
fact, here’s a thought: Some things we consider inanimate actually may
already be “alive.” It all depends on how we define life, something
England’s work might prompt us to reconsider. “People think of the
origin of life as being a rare process,” says Vijay Pande, a Stanford
chemistry professor. “Jeremy’s proposal makes life a consequence of
physical laws, not something random.”

England’s idea may
sound strange, even incredible, but it’s drawn the attention of an
impressive posse of high-level academics. After all, while Darwinism may
explain evolution and the complex world we live in today, it doesn’t
account for the onset of intelligent beings. England’s insistence on
probing for the step that preceded all of our current assumptions about
life is what makes him stand out, says Carl Franck, a Cornell physics
professor, who’s been following England’s work closely. “Every 30 years
or so we experience these gigantic steps forward,” Franck says. “We’re
due for one. And this might be it.”

And all from a modern Orthodox Jew with fancy sneakers.

****

Before
England became a religious man — he prays three times a day — he was a
scientist. From the time he could read, he devoured books on subjects
from philosophy to music to fantasy. By 9 he was plowing his way through Stephen Hawking’s opus, A Brief History of Time .“He
couldn’t comprehend it, but he tried really hard,” says his father,
Richard England, an economics professor at the University of New
Hampshire. Yes,
Dad is an economics professor and Mom a public school teacher, and the
couple took their two children to museums and to visit the Harvard
campus,just a few hours from their small seacoast town. But the elder England contends his son’s upbringing doesn’t begin to explain his intellectual curiosity.

Or
England’s long timeline of asking big questions. Over drinks some years
ago, a childhood friend reminded him of a time that young Jeremy turned
to him out of nowhere and reflected: “You know, Adam, if the dinosaurs
can go extinct, then so can we.” England was 3 then. For his part,
England says it wasn’t until he hit about 7 that he felt a sense of
anxiety about “not knowing enough.” That anxiety would compel him
through an almost comical list of academic bastions — Harvard, Oxford,
Stanford and Princeton, and now, a 3-year-old teaching gig at MIT.

Still,
God wasn’t a big player for England during most of his early life.
While his mom is Jewish — his dad was raised Lutheran but never felt
strongly about passing on his Protestant ties — there wasn’t a lot of
religious talk while he was growing up. The Englands would share a
festive meal for Passover and light candles for Hanukkah, but the family
didn’t keep a Bible in the home. His mother, England says, was born in
Poland in 1947 to a family ravaged by the Holocaust. Much of her
extended family — including her grandparents — were killed by the Nazis,
and in the wake of such destruction, England says, Judaism brought up
negative, painful feelings for her; she distanced herself.

It
seems ironic, then, that anti-Semitism would eventually push England to
the faith he says his mother spurned. While studying at Oxford in the
early 2000s, he faced his first anti-Israel sentiment from classmates
— which got him, in expected fashion, reading books and picking
people’s brains to figure out where he stood on the issue. And in 2005,
he visited Israel for the first time — where he “fell in love.” Studying
the Torah provided an opportunity for intellectual engagement that he
says was “unlike anything I had ever experienced in terms of subtlety
and grandeur of scope.”

****

Back
in Palo Alto, between meeting with Berkeley professors and Stanford
students, England reboots his computer to show me a simulation he’s been
working on, meanwhile explaining that his lab is less test tubes and
white coats than blackboards and computers screens. Jet-setting across
the country to talk about his theories isn’t England’s usual routine.
That, he says, looks more like dirty diapers, brainstorming atop a yoga
ball with his infant son, working with students and plugging data into
formulas.

England didn’t begin with number-crunching, though.
During his postdoc research on embryonic development, he kept coming
back to the question: What qualifies something as alive
or not? He later superimposed an analytical rigor to that question,
publishing an equation in 2013 about how much energy is required for
self-replication to take place. For England, that investigation was only
the beginning. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he says, his
normally deep voice rising until eventually cracking. “It was so
frustrating.” Over the next year, he worked on a second paper, which is
under peer review now. This one took his past findings and used them to
explain theoretically how, under certain physical circumstances, life
could emerge from nonlife.

In the most basic terms, Darwinism and
the idea of natural selection tell us that well-adapted organisms evolve
in order to survive and better reproduce in their environment. England
doesn’t dispute this reasoning, but he argues that it’s too vague. For
instance, he says, blue whales and phytoplankton thrive in the same
environmental conditions — the ocean — but they do so by vastly
different means. That’s because that while they’re both made of the same
basic building blocks, strings of DNA are arranged differently in each
organism.

Now take England’s simulation of an opera singer who
holds a crystal glass and sings at a certain pitch. Instead of
shattering, England predicts that over time, the atoms will rearrange
themselves to better absorb the energy the singer’s voice projects,
essentially protecting the glass’s livelihood. So how’s a glass distinct
from, say, a plankton-type organism that rearranges it self over several generations? Does that make glass a living organism?

These
are pretty things to ponder. Unfortunately, England’s work hasn’t yet
provided any answers, leaving the professor in a kind of speculative
state as he doggedly tries to put numbers to it all. “He hasn’t put
enough cards on the table yet,” Franck says. “He’ll need to make more
testable predictions.” So it remains to be seen where England will land
in the end. Other scientists have made similar claims about energy
dissipation in the context of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, but none
has found a definitive means for applying this science to the origin of
life.

****

So what does God have
to do with all this? In his quest for answers, England, of course,
finds himself at the center of the classic struggle between science and
spirituality. While Christianity and Darwinism are generally opposed,
Judaism doesn’t take issue with the science of life. The Rabbinical
Council of America even takes the stance that “evolutionary theory,
properly understood, is not incompatible with belief in a Divine
Creator.”

For his part, England believes science can give us explanations and predictions, but it can never tell us what we should
do with that information. That’s where, he says, the religious
teachings come in. Indeed, the man who’s one-upping Darwin has spent the
past 10 years painstakingly combing through the Torah,
interpreting it word by word much the way he ponders the meaning of
life. His conclusion? Common translations are lacking. Take the term
“creation.” England suggests we understand it not as the literal making
of the Earth but rather as giving Earth a name. All throughout the
Bible, he says, there are examples of terms that could be interpreted
differently from what we’ve come to accept as standard.

That even
applies to some of the good book’s most famous players, like Joseph, the
ancient biblical interpreter of dreams, who rose to become the most
powerful man in Egypt after the pharaoh. Maybe, England suggests, he
wasn’t a fortune-teller. Maybe he was a scientist.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

There are perfectly valid reasons for adjusting older temperature data (growing heat island effects around measuring stations, etc.), but there appear to be some anomalies in at least some of the corrections, probably due to a combination of human errors and perhaps bias. The total effect of the anomalies is not known, however.

The “vanishing” of polar ice (and the polar bears) has become a poster-child for warmists.Photo: ALAMY

When future generations look
back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will
shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature
records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were
systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more
than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”,
I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog,
had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations
in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded.
In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been
dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that
showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised
by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger
question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South
American weather stations around the original three. In each case he
found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made
by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They
were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the
Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data
Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures
across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken.
Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely
for their belief in “global warming”.

Homewood has now turned his attention to
the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51
degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly
every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming
up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was
actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson,
who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office
(and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see
how the new version completely “disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years”
around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his
country’s economy.

One of the first examples of these
“adjustments” was exposed in 2007 by the statistician Steve McIntyre,
when he discovered a paper published in 1987 by James Hansen, the
scientist (later turned fanatical climate activist) who for many years
ran Giss. Hansen’s original graph showed temperatures in the Arctic as
having been much higher around 1940 than at any time since. But as
Homewood reveals in his blog post, “Temperature adjustments transform
Arctic history”, Giss has turned this upside down. Arctic temperatures
from that time have been lowered so much that that they are now dwarfed
by those of the past 20 years.

Homewood’s interest in the Arctic is partly because the “vanishing” of
its polar ice (and the polar bears) has become such a poster-child for
those trying to persuade us that we are threatened by runaway warming.
But he chose that particular stretch of the Arctic because it is where
ice is affected by warmer water brought in by cyclical shifts in a major
Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years ago when
Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The
ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.

Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale
manipulation of the official temperature record – for reasons GHCN and
Giss have never plausibly explained – has become the real elephant in
the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known. This
really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals
of all time (author's opinion).

Organic food has more of the antioxidant compounds linked to better
health than regular food, and lower levels of toxic metals and
pesticides, according to the most comprehensive scientific analysis to
date.

The international team behind the work suggests that switching to
organic fruit and vegetables could give the same benefits as adding one
or two portions of the recommended "five a day".

The team, led by Prof Carlo Leifert
at Newcastle University, concludes that there are "statistically
significant, meaningful" differences, with a range of antioxidants being
"substantially higher" – between 19% and 69% – in organic food. It is
the first study to demonstrate clear and wide-ranging differences
between organic and conventional fruits, vegetables and cereals.

The researchers say the increased levels of antioxidants are
equivalent to "one to two of the five portions of fruits and vegetables
recommended to be consumed daily and would therefore be significant and
meaningful in terms of human nutrition, if information linking these
[compounds] to the health benefits associated with increased fruit,
vegetable and whole grain consumption is confirmed".

The findings will bring to the boil a long-simmering row over whether
those differences mean organic food is better for people, with one
expert calling the work sexed up.

Tom Sanders, a professor of nutrition at King's College London, said
the research did show some differences. "But the question is are they
within natural variation? And are they nutritionally relevant? I am not
convinced."
Graphic
He said Leifert's work had caused controversy in the past. "Leifert
has had a lot of aggro with a lot of people. He is oversexing [this
report] a bit." Sanders added the research showed organic cereals have
less protein than conventional crops.

The
research was peer-reviewed and is published in a respected scientific
journal, the British Journal of Nutrition. It was due to be released
next week, but has appeared on severalacademicwebsites.

The results are based on an analysis of 343 peer-reviewed studies
from around the world – more than ever before – which examine
differences between organic and conventional fruit, vegetables and
cereals.

"The crucially important thing about this research is that it
shatters the myth that how we farm does not affect the quality of the
food we eat," said Helen Browning, chief executive of Soil Association,
which campaigns for organic farming.

UK sales of organic food, which is often considerably more expensive than non-organic, are recovering after a slump during the economic crisis.

Plants produce many of their antioxidant compounds to fight back
against pest attacks, so the higher levels in organic crops may result
from their lack of protection by chemical sprays. But the scientists say
other reasons may be important, such as organic varieties being bred
for toughness and not being overfed with artificial fertilisers.
Leifert and his colleagues conclude that many antioxidants "have
previously been linked to a reduced risk of chronic diseases, including
cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative diseases and certain
cancers". But they also note that no long-term studies showing health
benefits from a broad organic diet have yet been conducted.

The researchers found much higher levels of cadmium, a toxic metal,
in conventional crops. Pesticide residues were found on conventional
crops four times more often than on organic food. The research was
funded by the EU and an organic farming charity.

The
research is certain to be criticised: the inclusion of so many studies
in the analysis could mean poor quality work skews the results, although
the team did "sensitivity analyses" and found that excluding weaker
work did not significantly change the outcome.

Also, the higher levels of cadmium and pesticides in conventional
produce were still well below regulatory limits. But the researchers say
cadmium accumulates over time in the body and that some people may wish
to avoid this, and that pesticide limits are set individually, not for
the cocktail of chemicals used on crops.

A further criticism is that the differences seen may result from
different climate, soil types and crop varieties, and not from organic
farming, though the researchers argue that combining many studies should
average out these other differences.

The greatest criticism, however, will be over the suggestions of potential health benefits. The most recent major analysis, which took in 223 studies in 2012,
found little evidence. "The published literature lacks strong evidence
that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional
foods," it found.

Sanders said he was not persuaded by the new work. "You are not going
to be better nourished if you eat organic food," he said. "What is most
important is what you eat, not whether it's organic or conventional.
It's whether you eat fruit and vegetables at all. People are buying into
a lifestyle system. They get an assurance it is not being grown with
chemicals and is not grown by big business."

He added that organic farming did help to address the significant
problem in the UK of soil degradation and excess fertiliser polluting
rivers.

But many also say care for the environment (44%) and animal welfare (31%) are important, as is taste (35%).

Browning said: "This research backs up what people think about
organic food. In other countries there has long been much higher levels
of support and acceptance of the benefits of organic food and farming.
We hope these findings will bring the UK in line with the rest of
Europe."

The published literature lacks strong evidence that
organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods.
Consumption of organic foods may reduce exposure to pesticide residues
and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Organic produce has become increasingly popular in recent years.
There are several reasons that consumers might prefer organic produce,
including the belief that organic farming is better for the environment
and more sustainable. I am going to focus in this article about the
health effects of organic produce. Environmental claims for organic
farming are complex and controversial – I will just say that such claims
largely fall prey to the naturalistic and false dichotomy fallacies. In
my opinion, farming practices should be evaluated on their own merits
individually, based on evidence rather than philosophy. Sustainable and
environmentally friendly farming are certainly laudable goals and I
support farming practices promote them, however they are labeled.

The alleged superiority of organically grown produce is a separate question. In a 2003 survey 68.9%
of people who purchase organic food said they did so because they
believed it to be healthier (more than any other reason given).
However, fifty years of research has so far not produced convincing evidence that there is any health benefit to consuming organic food. Likewise, systematic reviews of nutritional quality of organic produce also reveals no difference from conventional produce.

The recent review is therefore in
agreement with previous reviews – organic produce is not more nutritious
or healthful, but it is more expensive.

Some studies that find small differences in the content of specific
nutrients may be due to confounding factors. For example, organic
produce is generally smaller than conventional produce, so if nutrient
content is measured by mass (as opposed to the total for an individual
vegetable or piece of fruit) organic produce may have a slightly higher
concentration. This does not necessarily translate to more overall
nutrients for the consumer. Further, many studies measure multiple
endpoints (nutrients) and find some differences, but may not be properly
accounting for multiple analyses. The researchers in the recent study
found that results were “heterogeneous” – meaning that there were
significant differences in outcome among the studies. This could
indicate a lack of replicability of specific outcomes, indicating that
differences were more artifacts of method rather than genuine.

One type of study that I have not seen is essentially the equivalent
of an “intention to treat” analysis – what is the impact of buying
organic food in the real world. Even if there are tiny nutritional
advantages to organic food (although to be clear this conclusion is not
supported by the evidence), is there an overall nutritional advantage to
eating organic? Does the higher price mean that for many consumers
fewer overall fresh produce will be consumed?

The recent review did find that organic produce had fewer pesticide
residues than conventional farming. However, there is no evidence that
these low levels of pesticides present any health risk. The review
found:

The risk for contamination with detectable pesticide
residues was lower among organic than conventional produce (risk
difference, 30% [CI, −37% to −23%]), but differences in risk for
exceeding maximum allowed limits were small.

So while there was a difference, this did not result in a significant
difference in terms of exceeding safe limits. Further, studies looking
at health outcomes did not find any significant difference between
consuming organic vs conventional produce. These studies are limited in
number and duration, however. Further, there may be a bias in how these
studies are performed. Organic farming does use pesticides, but only
“natural” pesticides are allowed. There is little to no evidence that
these organic pesticides are less harmful for consumers or the
environment. It is just assumed that they are based upon the
naturalistic fallacy.

Even if we take the most pro-organic assumption – that there are more
pesticides on conventional produce and that those pesticides have
greater negative health effects than organic pesticides, it must still
be recognized that simply washing fruits and vegetables effectively
reduces pesticide residue. If minimized exposure to pesticide residue is
your goal, thoroughly washing your produce is probably the easiest and
cheapest way to achieve that end.

Differences in bacterial contamination were similar. There were no
differences seen in E. coli contamination. There was a 33% greater
chance of isolated a multi-antibiotic resistance bacteria on
conventional produce, but no evidence this translates into a health
risk. Again – even if we assume a difference in health risk (something
not demonstrated by the data) this can be remedied by thorough washing.

Conclusion

The recent review of organic vs conventional produce agrees with
previous systematic reviews that there is insufficient evidence to
conclude that organic produce is healthier or more nutritious that
conventional produce. Despite the scientific evidence, the alleged
health benefits of organic produce is the number one reason given by
consumers for buying organic. This likely represents the triumph of
marketing over scientific reality.

Life on Earth has always been dependent on the conditions of the
Sun, so scientists spend a lot of time studying its activity. A recent
announcement from solar scientists suggests that the Sun may soon enter a
period of significant reduced activity, possibly causing a mini ice age
by 2030 – just 15 years from now.

The model has shown to have a 97% accuracy when mapping the past
movements of sunspots, using data of solar cycles from 1976 to 2008. And
if this reliability continues, then the model also has some alarming
predictions for the future: a mini ice age sometime around the 2030s.

To achieve these findings, the scientists mapped the movement of
solar fluid that moves in roughly 11-year cycles, which correspond to
weather cycles on Earth. Around the year 2022 (labeled cycle 25), a pair
of waves will be moving to the Northern and Southern Hemispheres of the
Sun, getting slowly out of synch and reducing solar activity – and
thus our warm weather.

"In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other – peaking at
the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun. Their interaction
will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other. We predict
that this will lead to the properties of a 'Maunder minimum'," said Zharkova.

The Maunder minimum was
a 70-year period between 1645 and 1715. The Sun produced barely any
sunspots and the Earth experienced a mini ice age. Parts of northern
Europe and the United States experienced uncharacteristically
cold winters. The river Thames, flowing through London, even froze over
for seven weeks and was passable by foot. The surface was so stable that
residents could even hold 'frost fairs' on the ice.

Sunspots are relatively 'cool' regions on the Sun that appear darker
when photographed. They are cooler than the rest of the Sun, but they
are still around 4500 K (4200ºC,
7600ºF). They are caused by a concentration of intense, magnetic field
from the Sun. This inhibits and redirects the flow of hot matter to that
region and makes it darker – what we call a sunspot.

Sunspots last between 1 to 100 days, during which they rotate around
the Sun, following the flow of solar fluid. Sunspots go through cycles
of intensity and sparsity based on the motion of the fluid cycles. There
are two main waves that are slightly offset over time, producing
periods of maximum and minimum solar activity.

"Effectively, when the waves are approximately in phase, they can
show strong interaction, or resonance, and we have strong solar
activity," Zharkova said.

"When they are out of phase, we have solar minimums. When there is
full phase separation, we have the conditions last seen during the
Maunder minimum, 370 years ago."

Since our article
yesterday about how reduced solar activity could lead to the next
little ice age, IFLScience has spoken to the researcher who started the
furor: Valentina Zharkova. She announced the findings from her team's research on solar activity last week at the Royal Astronomical Society.
She noted that her team didn't realize how much of an impact their
research would have on the media, and that it was journalists (including
ourselves) who picked up on the possible impact on the
climate. However, Zharkova says that this is not a reason to dismiss
this research or the predictions about the environment.

“We didn't mention anything about the weather change, but I would
have to agree that possibly you can expect it,” she informed
IFLScience.

The future predicted activity of the Sun has been likened to the
Maunder Minimum. This was a period when the Sun entered an especially
inactive period, producing fewer sunspots than usual. This minimum
happened at the same time that conditions in Northern America and Europe
went unusually icy and cold, a period of time known as the “little ice
age.”

The previous Maunder Minimum occurred in the 17th century and lasted
between 50 and 60 years. During this time, winters were colder: for
example the River Thames, which usually flows through London,
notoriously froze over. The ice was so thick that people could walk from
one side to the other. However, the citizens that lived in freezing,
17th century Europe survived these cold winters, and they didn't have
the heating technology that we are fortunate enough to have today. If
the next solar activity minimum does affect the weather on Earth, it
will not be deadly for the human race.

Zharkova compared the Maunder Minimum with the one that her team
predicted to occur around 15 years into the future. The next
minimum will likely be a little bit shorter than the one in the 17th
century, only lasting a maximum of three solar cycles (around 30 years).

The conditions during this next predicted minimum will still be
chilly: “It will be cold, but it will not be this ice age when
everything is freezing like in the Hollywood films,” Zharkova chuckled.

The predictions that Zharkova announced came from a mathematical
program that analyzed data from the Sun. The team decided that they
wanted to monitor the Sun's background magnetic field (which governs
solar features like sunspots). You can see the team's data for cycles
21–23 published in The Astrophysical Journal.

After analyzing the solar data with their model, Zharkova's team
noticed something that no one had ever expected before: that the Sun
produces the magnetic waves in pairs. Previously everyone had thought
that there was only a single source of magnetic waves in the Sun, but
the evidence suggested two sources. The team used these observations to
predict how the Sun's magnetic field would change in the future. “This
is where we predicted this new Maunder minima,” Zharkova added.

She commented on how the changes in the Sun are likely to affect the
Earth's environment. “During the minimum, the intensity of solar
radiation will be reduced dramatically. So we will have less heat coming
into the atmosphere, which will reduce the temperature.”

However, Zharkova ends with a word of warning: not about the cold but
about humanity's attitude toward the environment during the minimum. We
must not ignore the effects of global warming and assume that it isn't
happening. “The Sun buys us time to stop these carbon emissions,”
Zharkova says. The next minimum might give the Earth a chance to reduce
adverse effects from global warming.

Maunder Minimum

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Maunder minimum in a 400-year history of sunspot numbers

The Maunder Minimum, also known as the "prolonged sunspot
minimum", is the name used for the period starting in about 1645 and
continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time.

The term was introduced after John A. Eddy published a landmark 1976 paper in Science.[1] Astronomers before Eddy had also named the period after the solar astronomers Annie Maunder (1868-1947) and E. Walter Maunder (1851–1928) who studied how sunspot latitudes changed with time.[2]
The period the husband and wife team examined included the second half
of the 17th century. Two papers were published in Edward Maunder's name
in 1890 and 1894, and he cited earlier papers written by Gustav Spörer.[3] Due to the social climate of the time, Annie's contribution was not publicly recognized.[4]

Spörer noted that during one 30-year period within the Maunder
Minimum observations showed fewer than 50 sunspots, as opposed to a more
typical 40,000–50,000 spots in modern times.[5]

During the Maunder Minimum enough sunspots were sighted so that
11-year cycles could be extrapolated from the count. The maxima occurred
in 1676, 1684, 1695, 1705 and 1716.

The sunspot activity was then concentrated in the southern hemisphere
of the Sun, except for the last cycle when the sunspots appeared in the
northern hemisphere, too.

According to Spörer's law,
at the start of a cycle, spots appear at ever lower latitudes until
they average at about latitude 15° at solar maximum. The average then
continues to drift lower to about 7° and after that, while spots of the
old cycle fade, new cycle spots start appearing again at high latitudes.

The visibility of these spots is also affected by the velocity of the sun's surface rotation at various latitudes:

Visibility is somewhat affected by observations being done from the ecliptic. The ecliptic is inclined 7° from the plane of the Sun's equator (latitude 0°).

Little Ice Age

Comparison of group sunspot numbers (top), Central England Temperature
(CET) observations (middle) and reconstructions and modeling of Northern
Hemisphere Temperatures (NHT). The CET in red are summer averages (for
June, July and August) and in blue winter averages (for December of
previous year, January and February). NHT in grey is the distribution
from basket of paleoclimate reconstructions (darker grey showing higher
probability values) and in red are from model simulations that account
for solar and volcanic variations. By way of comparison, on the same
scales the anomaly for modern data (after 31 December 1999) for summer
CET is +0.65oC, for winter CET is +1.34oC, and for NHT is +1.08oC. Sunspot data are as in supplementary data to [6] and Central England Temperature data are as published by the UK Met Office [7] The NHT data are described in box TS.5, Figure 1 of the IPCC AR5 report of Working Group 1.[8]

The Maunder Minimum roughly coincided with the middle part of the Little Ice Age,
during which Europe and North America experienced very cold winters. A
causal connection between low sunspot activity and cold European winters
has recently been made using the longest existing surface temperature
record, the Central England Temperature record [9] and also using the ERA-40 re-analysis dataset.[10] A potential explanation of this has been offered by observations by NASA's Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment, which suggest that solar UV output is more variable over the course of the solar cycle than scientists had previously thought.[11] In 2011, an article was published in the Nature Geoscience
journal that uses a climate model with stratospheric layers and the
SORCE data to tie low solar activity to jet stream behavior and mild
winters in some places (southern Europe and Canada/Greenland) and colder
winters in others (northern Europe and the United States).[12] In Europe, examples of very cold winters are 1683-4, 1694-5, and the winter of 1708–9.[13] In such years, River Thames frost fairs were held.

However the Thames ceased to freeze in the 19th century largely because the removal of the "Old" (medieval) London Bridge in 1825 dramatically increased the river's flow into the Pool of London.
The original 240–270-metre (800–900 ft) bridge stood upon 19
irregularly spaced arches that were set into the river bed on large starlings. It acted as a weir holding back the slack upstream waters from the tidal brackish, salt water downstream. The construction of Thames Embankment (began 1862) further increased the river's hydrological flow by narrowing the width of waterway through the centre of capital.[original research?]

Note that the term "Little Ice Age" applied to the Maunder minimum is
something of a misnomer as it implies a period of unremitting cold (and
on a global scale), which is not the case. For example, the coldest
winter in the Central England Temperature
record is 1683-4, but the winter just 2 years later (both in the middle
of the Maunder minimum) was the fifth warmest in the whole 350-year CET
record. Furthermore, summers during the Maunder minimum were not
significantly different to those seen in subsequent years. The drop in
global average temperatures in paleoclimate reconstructions at the start
of the Little Ice Age was between about 1560 and 1600, whereas the
Maunder minimum began almost 50 years later.[original research?]

Other observations

Solar activity events recorded in radiocarbon.

Graph showing proxies of solar activity, including changes in sunspot number and cosmogenic isotope production.

Some scientists hypothesize that the dense wood used in Stradivarius instruments was caused by slow tree growth during the cooler period. Instrument maker Antonio Stradivari was born a year before the start of the Maunder Minimum.[14]

Past solar activity may be recorded by various proxies including carbon-14 and beryllium-10.[15]
These indicate lower solar activity during the Maunder Minimum. The
scale of changes resulting in the production of carbon-14 in one cycle
is small (about one percent of medium abundance) and can be taken into
account when radiocarbon dating is used to determine the age of archaeological artifacts. The interpretation of the beryllium-10 and carbon-14 cosmogenic isotope abundance records stored in terrestrial reservoirs such as ice sheets and tree rings has been greatly aided by reconstructions of solar and heliospheric magnetic fields based on historic data on Geomagnetic storm
activity, which bridge the time gap between the end of the usable
cosmogenic isotope data and the start of modern spacecraft data.[16][17]

Other historical sunspot minima have been detected either directly or
by the analysis of the cosmogenic isotopes; these include the Spörer Minimum (1450–1540), and less markedly the Dalton Minimum (1790–1820). In a 2012 study, sunspot minima have been detected by analysis of carbon-14 in lake sediments.[18]
In total there seem to have been 18 periods of sunspot minima in the
last 8,000 years, and studies indicate that the sun currently spends up
to a quarter of its time in these minima.

A paper based on an analysis of a Flamsteed drawing, suggests that the Sun's surface rotation slowed in the deep Maunder minimum (1684).[19]

During the Maunder Minimum aurorae had been observed seemingly normally, with a regular decadal-scale cycle.[20][21]
This is somewhat surprising because the later, and less deep, Dalton
sunspot minimum is clearly seen in auroral occurrence frequency, at
least at lower geomagnetic latitudes.[22]
Because geomagnetic latitude is an important factor in auroral
occurrence, (lower-latitude aurorae requiring higher levels of
solar-terrestrial activity) it becomes important to allow for population
migration and other factors that may have influenced the number of
reliable auroral observers at a given magnetic latitude for the earlier
dates.[23] Decadal-scale cycles during the Maunder minimum can also be seen in the abundances of the beryllium-10 cosmogenic isotope (which unlike carbon-14 can be studied with annual resolution) [24]
but these appear to be in antiphase with any remnant sunspot activity.
An explanation in terms of solar cycles in loss of solar magnetic flux
was proposed in 2012.[25]

The fundamental papers on the Maunder minimum (Eddy, Legrand, Gleissberg, Schröder, Landsberg et al.) have been published in Case studies on the Spörer, Maunder and Dalton Minima.[26]

Eris was discovered in January 2005 by a Palomar Observatory–based team led by Mike Brown, and its identity was verified later that year. It is a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) and a member of a high-eccentricity population known as the scattered disk. It has one known moon, Dysnomia. As of 2014[update], its distance from the Sun is 96.4 astronomical units (1.442×1010 km; 8.96×109 mi),[14] roughly three times that of Pluto. With the exception of some comets, Eris and Dysnomia are currently the most distant known natural objects in the Solar System.[2][d]

Because Eris appeared to be larger than Pluto, NASA initially described it as the Solar System's tenth planet. This, along with the prospect of other objects of similar size being discovered in the future, motivated the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to define the term planet for the first time. Under the IAU definition approved on August 24, 2006, Eris is a "dwarf planet", along with objects such as Pluto, Ceres, Haumea and Makemake,[19] thereby reducing the number of known planets in the Solar System to eight, the same number as before Pluto's discovery in 1930. Observations of a stellar occultation by Eris in 2010 showed that its diameter was 2,326 ± 12 kilometers (1,445.3 ± 7.5 mi), not significantly different from that of Pluto.[20][21] After New Horizons measured Pluto's diameter as 2370 km in July 2015, it was proven that Eris is slightly smaller in diameter than Pluto.[22]

Routine observations were taken by the team on October 21, 2003, using the 1.2 m Samuel OschinSchmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory, California, but the image of Eris was not discovered at that point due to its very slow motion across the sky: The team's automatic image-searching software excluded all objects moving at less than 1.5 arcseconds per hour to reduce the number of false positives returned. When Sedna was discovered, it was moving at 1.75 arcsec/h, and in light of that the team reanalyzed their old data with a lower limit on the angular motion, sorting through the previously excluded images by eye. In January 2005, the re-analysis revealed Eris's slow motion against the background stars.

Animation showing the movement of Eris on the images used to discover it. Eris is indicated by the arrow. The three frames were taken over a period of three hours.

Distribution of trans-Neptunian objects

Follow-up observations were then carried out to make a preliminary determination of Eris's orbit, which allowed the object's distance to be estimated. The team had planned to delay announcing their discoveries of the bright objects Eris and Makemake until further observations and calculations were complete, but announced them both on July 29 when the discovery of another large TNO they had been tracking, Haumea, was controversially announced on July 27 by a different team in Spain.[2]

More observations released in October 2005 revealed that Eris has a moon, later named Dysnomia. Observations of Dysnomia's orbit permitted scientists to determine the mass of Eris, which in June 2007 they calculated to be 7022167000000000000♠(1.67±0.02)×1022 kg,[10] 27% greater than Pluto's.

Classification

Eris is a trans-Neptuniandwarf planet (plutoid).[24] Its orbital characteristics more specifically categorize it as a scattered-disk object (SDO), or a TNO that is believed to have been "scattered" from the Kuiper belt into more distant and unusual orbits following gravitational interactions with Neptune as the Solar System was forming. Although its high orbital inclination is unusual among the known SDOs, theoretical models suggest that objects that were originally near the inner edge of the Kuiper belt were scattered into orbits with higher inclinations than objects from the outer belt.[25] Inner-belt objects are expected to be generally more massive than outer-belt objects, and so astronomers expect to discover more large objects like Eris in high-inclination orbits, which have traditionally been neglected.

Because Eris was initially believed to be larger than Pluto, it was described as the "tenth planet" by NASA and in media reports of its discovery.[26] In response to the uncertainty over its status, and because of ongoing debate over whether Pluto should be classified as a planet, the IAU delegated a group of astronomers to develop a sufficiently precise definition of the term planet to decide the issue. This was announced as the IAU's Definition of a Planet in the Solar System, adopted on August 24, 2006. At this time, both Eris and Pluto were classified as dwarf planets, a category distinct from the new definition of planet.[27] Brown has since stated his approval of this classification.[28] The IAU subsequently added Eris to its Minor Planet Catalogue, designating it (136199) Eris.[29]

Name

Eris is named after the goddess Eris (Greek Ἔρις), a personification of strife and discord.[30] The name was assigned on September 13, 2006, following an unusually long period in which the object was known by the provisional designation2003 UB313, which was granted automatically by the IAU under their naming protocols for minor planets. The regular adjectival form of Eris is Eridian.

Xena

Due to uncertainty over whether the object would be classified as a planet or a minor planet, because different nomenclature procedures apply to these different classes of objects,[31] the decision on what to name the object had to wait until after the August 24, 2006, IAU ruling.[29] As a result, for a time the object became known to the wider public as Xena.

"Xena" was an informal name used internally by the discovery team. It was inspired by the title character of the television series Xena: Warrior Princess. The discovery team had reportedly saved the nickname "Xena" for the first body they discovered that was larger than Pluto. According to Brown,

We chose it since it started with an X (planet "X"), it sounds mythological (OK, so it's TV mythology, but Pluto is named after a cartoon, right?),[e] and (this part is actually true) we've been working to get more female deities out there (i.e.Sedna). Also, at the time, the TV show was still on TV, which shows you how long we've been searching![33]

"We assumed [that] a real name would come out fairly quickly, [but] the process got stalled," Mike Brown said in interview,

One reporter called me up from the New York Times who happened to have been a friend of mine from college, [and] I was a little less guarded with him than I am with the normal press. He asked me, "What's the name you guys proposed?" and I said, "Well, I'm not going to tell." And he said, "Well, what do you guys call it when you're just talking amongst yourselves?"... As far as I remember this was the only time I told anybody this in the press, and then it got everywhere, which I only sorta felt bad about—I kinda like the name.[34]

Choosing an official name

Artist's impression of the dwarf planet Eris. This artistic representation is based on observations made at ESO's La Silla Observatory.[35]

According to science writer Govert Schilling, Brown initially wanted to call the object "Lila", after a concept in Hindu mythology that described the cosmos as the outcome of a game played by Brahma. The name was very similar to "Lilah", the name of Brown's newborn daughter. Brown was mindful of not making his name public before it had been officially accepted. He had done so with Sedna a year previously, and had been heavily criticized. He listed the address of his personal web page announcing the discovery as /~mbrown/planetlila and in the chaos following the controversy over the discovery of Haumea, forgot to change it. Rather than needlessly anger more of his fellow astronomers, he simply said that the webpage had been named for his daughter and dropped "Lila" from consideration.[36]

Brown had also speculated that Persephone, the wife of the god Pluto, would be a good name for the object.[2] The name had been used several times in science fiction,[37] and was popular with the public, having handily won a poll conducted by New Scientist magazine ("Xena", despite only being a nickname, came fourth).[38] This was not possible once the object was classified as a dwarf planet, because there is already an asteroid with that name, 399 Persephone.[2]

With the dispute resolved, the discovery team proposed Eris on September 6, 2006. On September 13, 2006 this name was accepted as the official name by the IAU.[39][40] Brown decided that, because the object had been considered a planet for so long, it deserved a name from Greek or Roman mythology, like the other planets. The asteroids had taken the vast majority of Graeco-Roman names. Eris, whom Brown described as his favorite goddess, had fortunately escaped inclusion.[34] The name in part reflects the discord in the astronomical community caused by the debate over the object's (and Pluto's) nature.

Orbit

The orbit of Eris (blue) compared to those of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (white/gray). The arcs below the ecliptic are plotted in darker colors, and the red dot is the Sun. The diagram on the left is a polar view whereas the diagrams on the right are different views from the ecliptic.

Eris's orbit is highly eccentric, and brings Eris to within 37.9 AU of the Sun, a typical perihelion for scattered objects. This is within the orbit of Pluto, but still safe from direct interaction with Neptune (29.8–30.4 AU). Pluto, on the other hand, like other plutinos, follows a less inclined and less eccentric orbit and, protected by orbital resonance, can cross Neptune's orbit. It is possible that Eris is in a 17:5 resonance with Neptune, though further observations will be required to check that hypothesis.[44] Unlike the eight planets, whose orbits all lie roughly in the same plane as the Earth's, Eris's orbit is highly inclined: It is tilted at an angle of about 44 degrees to the ecliptic. In about 800 years, Eris will be closer to the Sun than Pluto for some time (see the graph at the right).

Eris currently has an apparent magnitude of 18.7, making it bright enough to be detectable to some amateur telescopes. A 200 millimetres (7.9 in) telescope with a CCD can detect Eris under favorable conditions.[f] The reason it had not been noticed until now is its steep orbital inclination; most searches for large outer Solar System objects concentrate on the ecliptic plane, where most bodies are found.

Because of the high inclination of its orbit, Eris only passes through a few constellations of the traditional Zodiac; it is now in the constellation Cetus. It was in Sculptor from 1876 until 1929 and Phoenix from roughly 1840 until 1875. In 2036 it will enter Pisces and stay there until 2065, when it will enter Aries.[41] It will then move into the northern sky, entering Perseus in 2128 and Camelopardalis (where it will reach its northernmost declination) in 2173.

In 2005, the diameter of Eris was measured to be 7006239700000000000♠2397±100 km, using images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).[45][47] The size of an object is determined from its absolute magnitude (H) and the albedo (the amount of light it reflects). At a distance of 97 AU, an object with a diameter of 3,000 km would have an angular size of 40 milliarcseconds,[15] which is directly measurable with the Hubble Space Telescope. Although resolving such small objects is at the very limit of the telescope's capabilities,[g] sophisticated image processing techniques such as deconvolution can be used to measure such angular sizes fairly accurately.[h]

This makes Eris around the same size as Pluto, which is 7006237000000000000♠2370 km across. It also indicates an albedo of 0.96, higher than that of any other large body in the Solar System except Enceladus.[8] It is speculated that the high albedo is due to the surface ices being replenished because of temperature fluctuations as Eris's eccentric orbit takes it closer and farther from the Sun.[49]

In 2007, a series of observations of the largest trans-Neptunian objects with the Spitzer Space Telescope gave an estimate of Eris's diameter of 7006260000000000000♠2600+400
−200 km.[46] The Spitzer and Hubble estimates overlap in the range of 2,400–2,500 km, 4–8% larger than Pluto. Astronomers now suspect that Eris's spin axis is currently pointing toward the Sun, which would make the sunlit hemisphere warmer than average and skew any infrared measurements toward higher values.[9] So the outcome from the 2010 Chile occultation is actually more in line with the Hubble result from 2005.[9]

In November 2010, Eris was the subject of one of the most distant stellar occultations yet from Earth.[9] Preliminary data from this event cast doubt on previous size estimates.[9] The teams announced their final results from the occultation in October 2011, with an estimated diameter of 7006232600000000000♠2326+6
−6 km.[8] The mass of Eris can be calculated with much greater precision. Based on the currently accepted value for Dysnomia's period—15.774 days—[10][50] Eris is 27 percent more massive than Pluto. If the 2011 occultation results are used, then Eris has a density of 7003252000000000000♠2.52±0.05 g/cm3, substantially denser than Pluto, and thus must be composed largely of rocky materials.[8]
Models of internal heating via radioactive decay suggest that Eris could have an internal ocean of liquid water at the mantle–core boundary.[51]

In July of 2015, after nearly ten years of being considered the ninth-largest object known to directly orbit the sun, close-up imagery from the New Horizons mission more accurately determined Pluto's volume to be slightly larger than Eris's, rather than slightly smaller as previously thought. Eris is now the tenth-largest object known to directly orbit the sun by volume, though not by mass.[52]

Surface and atmosphere

The infrared spectrum of Eris, compared to that of Pluto, shows the marked similarities between the two bodies. Arrows denote methane absorption lines.

Artist's impression of Eris and Dysnomia. Eris is the main object, Dysnomia the small gray sphere just above it. The flaring object top-left is the Sun.

The discovery team followed up their initial identification of Eris with spectroscopic observations made at the 8 m Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii on January 25, 2005. Infrared light from the object revealed the presence of methane ice, indicating that the surface may be similar to that of Pluto, which at the time was the only TNO known to have surface methane, and of Neptune's moon Triton, which also has methane on its surface.[53] No surface details can be resolved from Earth or its orbit with any instrument currently available.

Due to Eris's distant eccentric orbit, its surface temperature is estimated to vary between about 30 and 56 K (−243.2 and −217.2 °C).[2]

Unlike the somewhat reddish Pluto and Triton, Eris appears almost white.[2] Pluto's reddish color is believed to be due to deposits of tholins on its surface, and where these deposits darken the surface, the lower albedo leads to higher temperatures and the evaporation of methane deposits. In contrast, Eris is far enough from the Sun that methane can condense onto its surface even where the albedo is low. The condensation of methane uniformly over the surface reduces any albedo contrasts and would cover up any deposits of red tholins.[54]

Even though Eris can be up to three times farther from the Sun than Pluto, it approaches close enough that some of the ices on the surface might warm enough to sublime. Because methane is highly volatile, its presence shows either that Eris has always resided in the distant reaches of the Solar System where it is cold enough for methane ice to persist, or that the celestial body has an internal source of methane to replenish gas that escapes from its atmosphere. This contrasts with observations of another discovered TNO, Haumea, which reveal the presence of water ice but not methane.[55]

Moon

In 2005, the adaptive optics team at the Keck telescopes in Hawaii carried out observations of the four brightest TNOs (Pluto, Makemake, Haumea, and Eris), using the newly commissioned laser guide star adaptive optics system.[56] Images taken on September 10 revealed a moon in orbit around Eris. In keeping with the "Xena" nickname already in use for Eris, Brown's team nicknamed the moon "Gabrielle", after the television warrior princess' sidekick. When Eris received its official name from the IAU, the moon received the name Dysnomia, after the Greek goddess of lawlessness who was Eris's daughter. Brown says he picked it for similarity to his wife's name, Diane. The name also retains an oblique reference to Eris's old informal name Xena, portrayed on TV by Lucy Lawless.[57]

About Me

My formal training is in chemistry. I also read a great deal of physics and biology. In fact I very much enjoy reading in general, mostly science, but also some fiction and history. I also enjoy computer programming and writing. I like hiking and exploring nature. I also enjoy people; not too much in social settings, but one on one; also, people with interesting or "off-beat" minds draw me to them. I also have some interest in Buddhism.

These days I get a lot more information from the internet, primarily through Wiki. Some television, e. g., documentaries, PBS shows like "Nova" and "Nature".

My favorite science writers are Jacob Bronowski ("The Ascent of Man") and Richard Dawkins (his "The Blind Watchmaker" is right up there up Ascent). I also have a favorite writer on Buddhism, Pema Chodron. Favorite films are "Annie Hall" (by Woody Allen), "The Maltese Falcon", "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", "As Good As It Gets", "Conspiracy Theory", Monty Python's "Search For The Holy Grail" and "Life of Brian", and a few others which I can't think about at the moment.

I love a number of classical works (Beethoven's "Pastoral", "Afternoon Of A Fawn" and "Clair De Lune" by Debussey , Pachelbel's "Canon" come to mind. My favorite piece is probably Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue". But I also enjoy a great deal in modern music, including many jazz pieces, folk songs by people like Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, a hodgepodge of pieces by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Niel Young, and practically everything the Beatles wrote.

My life over the last few years has been in some disarray, but I am finally "getting it together.". As I am very much into the sciences and writing, I would like to move more in this direction. I also enjoy teaching. As for my political leanings, most people would probably describe as basically liberal, though not extremely so. My religious leanings are to the absolutely none: I've alluded to my interest in Buddhism, but again this is not any supernatural or scientifically untested aspect of it but in the way it provides a powerful philosophy and set of practical, day to day methods of dealing with myself and the other human beings.